Lemelson Center Fellow Rachel Gross, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discusses how Americans paradoxically invented and relied upon all kinds of high-tech inventions to escape the modern world and get “back to nature.”

Charles Brannock (1903-1992) was born into the shoe business--his father Otis Brannock and Ernest Park had founded the Park-Brannock Shoe Store in Syracuse, New York, in 1906. The business was remarkably successful.

A donation of Elphaba's costume from "Wicked" to the collections of the National Museum of American History prompts a look into the inventions and innovations that help make "Wicked" such an amazing spectacle.